Communications and Marketing

Joshua Corey publishes first novel

Corey, an associate professor of English and chair of the Print and Digital Publishing program, describes his Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy as an existential noir, a love story, and a ghost story.

Ruth, aka “the new reader,” is the protagonist, who receives mysterious letters from her mother, in spite of the fact that her mother has been dead for several years. She hires Lamb, a private detective, whose investigation leads him across Europe and eventually to the man who may or may not be Ruth’s biological father. He narrates a tale of love and loss set against the backdrop of the student uprisings of May 1968 in Paris.

Novelist Laird Hunt contributed this endorsement: “This powerful novel, which pays out its rewards gradually, carefully, but also crisply, dare I say electrically, may be Joshua Corey’s first, but it feels exactly like the highly satisfying product of the fully formed imagination that birthed it. All of Corey’s hard-earned skill as a poet is put here to useful work. The push-pull between stunning language and inventive narrative is pure pleasure.”